Agricultural earthmoving Aussie style (Part One)

by Nick Drew | Wed 03 Dec 2014

Agricultural earthmoving Aussie style (Part One)

Our resident Englishman down under Michael Bullock has sent in another stunning series of photos featuring some of the kit that he has been using and seen at work on what he describes as agricultural earthmoving.

Most of the photos in this batch were taken between January & May this year, when Michael was working down in the South West of Western Australia cleaning out silt and mud from farm dams. Michael said, “Sheep and cows get stuck in the mud and can often die trying to reach the water, so the dams have to get cleaned out every now and again in preparation for when the winter rains do come, this enables the dams to hold a lot more much needed water for the following summer. Virtually every big “paddock” or field as we would call it has a dam for the livestock, when you consider that the average farm is a few thousand acres, that’s a lot of dams!”

Michael has been working with a fellow Earthmovers Magazine reader and Digger Man Blog follower Jason Cooney from Ireland, who was operating a selection of dozer building some new dams. As a general rule new dams are only formed in areas with good clay deposits. The company the lads are working for lost some major mining contracts during the crash and have now all but returned to their roots doing the agricultural side of things. Once local farmers heard that they were back on the scene the company was swamped with work, which gave the boys plenty to get on with during the hot summer months! "Dam season" as it is known down under, started for Michael on a bit of a relic from the past, when he was offered the seat on a Mitsubishi based Caterpillar EL200B which is a 20 tonne class machine. Michael described it as a step back in time for him and noted the lack of any form of eco mode! The machine had received a respray, with 90% of the hoses being replaced. A new air con unit and a radio had been fitted to keep the operator happy, but the reality was that the machine was too slow to keep up with the workload.

They use big dozers for agricultural work in Australia, here we see a D9N in action spreading clay on a dam wall.

Occasionally the big dozers encounter problems in the soft areas, a 50 tonne dozer on soft ground can be hard work as we see below with the D9N becoming heavily bogged. The machine was eventually extracted with the assistance of a D7R.

In this shot we see Michael’s work colleague, Irishman Jason Cooney at the controls of the Cat D7R working on a dam extension job.

At a later date a larger Volvo EC460B was brought in for Michael to operate replacing the Cat EL200B. Michael was to work this machine on some steep batters at times and had no tilt bucket to do the work with.

Look out for more photos of extreme agricultural earthmoving down under in part two of this blog post.

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